A review of Performing Embodied Histories: Colonialism, Gender, and Okinawa in Modern Japan, by Valerie Holshouser Barske.  Divided into six chapters with an Epilogue and Appendix, Valerie Barske’s dissertation examines Okinawa’s postwar history, identity formation, and the politicization of culture and gender through the lens of Okinawan performance culture. Providing a comprehensive historiography of both Japanese and English secondary sources, the first chapter emphasizes the methodological and theoretical dispositions of the dissertation. A hybridization of cultural history and...

A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA. The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching...

A review of Another Tale of the Heike: An Examination of the Engyōbon Heike monogatari, by Amy Christine Franks. Amy Franks’s meticulously researched and persuasively written dissertation is a study of the Engyōbon, a lesser-known but extremely important variant of the Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike, 13th century). Copied from a manuscript dated 1309 (the second year of the Engyō era), the Engyōbon Heike monogatari is widely regarded as the oldest existing Heike text. The manuscript was produced at Negoroji, a complex of Buddhist temples on Mt. Kōya, headquarters of the Shingon...

A review of Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko, by Angela Kristine Ahlgren. Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko is an astute exploration of the interrelated discursive practices informing the performance and historical narrative of North American taiko.  Particularly as taiko expands beyond Japanese- and Asian-American communities, studies such as Angela Ahlgren’s dissertation are important for their recognition and investigation of the ever-expanding groups interested in the art form. ...

A review of Modern Japanese Political History Materials, National Diet Library, Tokyo and Special Collections Room, Waseda University Library, Tokyo. The research I have been conducting in Tokyo for the past 2.5 years kept me busy in primarily two locations: the Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room in the National Diet Library at Tokyo (NDL) and the Special Collections Room in the Waseda University Library. Ed. Note: Please also see Kelly Hammond’s “Reflections on 5 collections in Japan essential for China scholars” for discussions on the National Diet Library and...

A review of Fragile Kinships: Family Ideologies and Child Welfare in Japan, by Kathryn Goldfarb. It is to Kathryn Goldfarb’s credit that her dissertation includes a series of emotionally difficult stories nevertheless rendered immensely readable and analytically provocative. Fragile Kinships explores child welfare and adoption practices to describe how family is constructed and continues to matter in contemporary Japan. In Japan and Japanese Studies, the “family” has long been a key social category, through which researchers and everyday people alike imagine and organize the human...

A review of A Heteroglossic Theory of Proto-Genbun Itchi in Edo and Early Meiji Writings, by Kelly J. Hansen. Historians and historiographers of modern Japanese literature have long debated the fraught relationship between “reality” and the language in which it is inevitably encoded and described. A teleological view of literary modernity often presumes a clean break between ossified tradition and modern innovation. Accordingly, analyses of the various calls for mimesis and linguistic transparency subsumed under the name genbun itchi have largely focused on the Meiji era as a period of such...

A review of The Violent Virtue: First Narratives of the Ishii Brothers’ Late Genroku Katakiuchi, by Drake Langford. Drake Langford’s dissertation examines multiple iterations of the story of the Ishii brothers’ extraordinary vendetta, executed in 1701, which involved the killing of a fellow samurai who had killed both their father and their older brother when they themselves were still small children. It provides valuable insights both into the process by which a historical anecdote was transformed as it was adapted to various fictional and non-fiction genres, and into what Langford posits...

We are very excited to welcome two new editors to “Japan Studies Dissertation Reviews,” Akiko Takenaka (University of Kentucky) and Niels van Steenpaal (University of Tokyo), as we bid a very fond farewell to our long-serving colleague Dennis Frost (Kalamazoo College). Our new triumvirate of editors — William Fleming (Yale University), Akiko and Niels — will continue to bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this dynamic field. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review Application...

It is with gratitude, and not a little sadness, that we bid a fond farewell to Dennis Frost, who has been editing the Japan Studies series here on Dissertation Reviews for more than two years. Dennis joined the editorial team when DR was just getting started, and on his watch, Japan Studies developed into one of our flagship series. Dennis will be moving on to concentrate on his second book project on the Japanese Paralympics. For a preview of his work-in-progress, we encourage everyone to read his award-winning article in The International Journal of the History of Sport entitled...

A review of “The Peony Lantern” and Fantastic Tales in Late Imperial China and Tokugawa Japan: Local History, Religion, and Gender, by Fumiko Jōo. On a festival night one year in mid-fourteenth century Ningbo, a young student glimpses a beautiful woman walking along the street in the company of a girl bearing a peony-adorned lantern. He invites the woman to his home and a passionate relationship ensues, but not long thereafter, the woman is revealed to be a ghost. Though the student enlists the protective intervention of spiritual authorities, he remains inexorably drawn to the ghostly...

A review of Fantasies of the Real: Illustrated Gazetteers in Early Modern Japan, by Robert Dale Goree. Robert Goree’s dissertation offers a comprehensive study of meisho zue, the illustrated guides to “famous places” (meisho) that arose in late eighteenth-century Japan and were published in great numbers well into the nineteenth century. These encyclopedic catalogs of culturally significant sites were disseminated to a wide, diverse readership and operated in tandem with early modern tourism, antiquarianism, cartography, literati culture, and an increasingly sophisticated publishing...

A review of Gaijin: Cultural Representations through Manga, 1930s-1950s, by Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua. Karl Chua’s dissertation makes an important contribution at the intersection of studies of modern Japanese imperialism and print culture. As the title suggests, the dissertation is an examination in Japanese comics of “gaijin,” broadly meaning both foreigners and non-Japanese persons. The manga and related materials he investigates come almost exclusively from a single source, Kodansha’s magazine Shōnen kurabu (Boys Club), which enjoyed almost a half-century long print run from 1914 until...

A review of the Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II, National Archives and Records Administration. College Park, MD, United States American researchers specializing in Asian topics often focus our attention on gathering materials in Asian languages that are indispensable for our research. Such Asian sources are irreplaceable, but there are also vast repositories of information related to Asia available closer to home that can be equally useful. As one example, the Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II provide unique insight...

A review of Saving Metropolis: Body and City in the Metropolis Tales, by Lawrence Bird. Film and architecture share much in common: both are public, capital-intensive art forms, both are inherently collaborative, and both structure our experience of time and space in ways as inscrutable as they are pervasive. It is therefore surprising that more work, theoretical and historiographical, has not been done exploring the intersections and interstices of these two modes of cultural production. Lawrence Bird’s dissertation is an ambitious interdisciplinary and comparative foray in that direction,...

A review of A Reception History of the Man’yōshū, by Fusae Ekida. Most readers of this review will be familiar with the Man’yōshū 万葉集 (c. 785), the oldest and largest extant collection of Japanese-language poetry, from excerpts in anthologies of classical Japanese literature, where the title is typically glossed as “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” and so will find Ekida’s preferred translation (“Collection for Ten Thousand Generations”) to be new. Fusae Ekida’s embrace of this alternate titular gloss indicates two important things about her dissertation. First, it...

A review of Creating Mass Culture in Interwar Japan, by Amy Bliss Marshall. Amy Marshall’s dissertation sheds much-needed light on the birth and development of what were arguably the two most important mass journals in mid-twentieth century Japan, Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). The dissertation traces the growing popularity of these two journals from the time of their first publication in 1925 through the tumultuous wartime decades of the 1930s and ’40s, a period during which each journal came to boast a monthly circulation of over one million. As Marshall argues,...

A review of Picturing Rice Agriculture and Silk Production: Appropriation and Ideology in Early Modern Japanese Painting, by Shalmit Bejarano. Shalmit Bejarano’s dissertation offers an interesting case study of Sino-Japanese cultural transmission in the early modern period built around one specific theme: Pictures of Agriculture and Sericulture (Ch: gengzhi tu, Jp: kōshoku-zu). While relying on semiotic, structuralist, and phenomenological readings of Japanese paintings, this dissertation explains how Japanese artists made conscious changes in style and program in order to deliver a new...

A review of Sarin Traces: Memory Texts and Practices in Postwar Japan, 1995-2010, by Mark Aaron Pendleton. Mark Pendleton’s dissertation throws light on the aftermath of the 1995 Tokyo subway gassing that came to be known generally as the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo gas attack. Having escaped becoming a victim only by a few minutes in 1995, his personal connection to the event strengthens his narrative of life-writing. As a primary focus, he opted for examining how the incident is culturally represented in memory texts and practices. The primary materials include life narratives of the victims,...

A review of the Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America. The Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland in College Park is a rich source of material from the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). It consists of virtually every book, magazine, and pamphlet that was published, censored, or suppressed by the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) under the aegis of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP). Occupation policy was influenced by competing political factions and subject to change over time, but one of...

A review of The Exponent of Breath: The Role of Foreign Evangelical Organizations in Combating Japan’s Tuberculosis Epidemic of the Early Twentieth Century, by Elisheva Perelman. In this dissertation Elisheva Perelman charts the establishment of American evangelical organizations in Japan, for whom the turn of the century tuberculosis epidemic proved a fortuitous opportunity to gain a foothold in the country. Although Japan’s modernization led to a swelling in the ranks of skilled physicians and research scientists, the urbanized labor with which it was associated also provided fertile...

Science for God’s Sake: Three Archival Reviews - Salvation Army Research Room (救世軍研究室), Tokyo, Japan [website] - Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas, United States [website] - Salvation Army National Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia, United States [Library of Congress listing] For my dissertation, The Exponent of Breath: The Role of Foreign Evangelists in Combating Japan’s Tuberculosis Epidemic in the Early Twentieth Century (University of California, Berkeley 2011), I had the pleasure of pursuing research at the far-flung archives of a number of...

A review of The World Beyond the Walls: Morishima Chūryō (1756-1810) and the Development of Late Edo Fiction, by William Fleming. William Fleming’s dissertation uses the writings of Morishima Chūryō 森島 中良 (1756-1810), a prolific literary figure virtually unknown in Western scholarship, to explore new perspectives on early modern Japanese popular fiction (gesaku). By examining both Chūryō’s fiction and nonfiction writings in connection to other intellectual discourses of the time, including nativist studies, vernacular Chinese, Dutch and Western Studies, and Russian texts,...

A review of the Tokyo National Museum Research and Information Center (東京国立博物館資料館), Tokyo, Japan. I was first introduced to the Resource and Information Center of the Tokyo National Museum shortly after beginning graduate school. Most recently I have been visiting the Center to conduct dissertation research on several handscrolls 絵巻物 associated with the Emperor Go-Shirakawa 後白河 (1127-1192). The Center is located within the Tokyo National Museum grounds, but despite the high volume of museum-goers, the Center remains remarkably quiet. I always have found it to be a...

A review of Envisioning Fascist Space, Time, and Body: Japanese Painting during the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945), by Asato Ikeda. This is a bold dissertation that not only engages with difficult and under-examined subject matter — Japanese war paintings of the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945) — but in addition, grapples with a complex and much debated topic: the concept of fascism as it relates to wartime Japan. Through an examination of both Japanese-style ink paintings (Nihon-ga) and Western-style oil paintings (yōga) produced during this period, and by a comparative analysis of Japan’s...

A review of Unpopular Music: The Politics of Mass Culture in Modern Japan, by Hiromu Nagahara. Recent scholarly work on state-society relations and the regulation of popular culture in Japan from the 1920s to the 1950s often focuses on the dominant role of the state or powerful elites in shaping Japanese mass media.  David Earhart, Barak Kushner, and Gregory Kasza, for instance, have examined upper-class elites’ preoccupation with lower-class culture as well as the ways in which agents of Japan’s empire promoted pro-war propaganda and censored unauthorized voices.  Similarly, Sheldon Garon...

A review of The East Asia Image Collection (Skillman Library Special Collections, Lafayette College). Several recent studies of Japanese imperialism have interrogated ephemeral sources such as picture postcards, propaganda magazines, and posters to discern what colonial conquest and continental expansion meant to the millions who rallied behind Japan’s ultimately self-defeating campaigns in Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) is an open-access digital repository of images from all areas of Japan’s empire that was designed to...

A review of The Five Great Space Repository Bodhisattvas: Lineage, Protection and Celestial Authority in Ninth-Century Japan, by Hillary Eve Pedersen. Hillary Pedersen’s dissertation presents an in-depth analysis of the iconography and ritual functions of an Esoteric Buddhist set of statues of the Five Great Space Repository Bodhisattvas (Godai Kokûzô Bosatsu; hereinafter GKB) in the religious context of early Heian period (794-900) Japan. Following preliminary discussions of the iconographical development of independent Kokûzô Bosatsu (Ākāśagarbha bodhisattva) images (Chapter 1) and...

A review of “No Barrier Between High and Low”: Love, Ethics, Status and Style in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku, by David James Gundry.  The fiction of Ihara Saikaku, with its dazzling wordplay, rich weave of (often contradictory) voices, and confoundingly fluid ethical positions, is remarkably difficult to write about. How is one to pin down Saikaku within any single argument when his narratorial mode is so dramatically hybrid and unstable, constantly undoing any semblance of a unitary voice or position—not only at the level of the work or the story, but even at the level of the sentence,...

A review of Sunappu: A Genre of Japanese Photography, 1930-1980, by Yoshiaki Kai. Yoshiaki Kai’s compelling dissertation examines the development of so-called sunappu photography in Japanese visual culture from its roots in the 1930s through the 1970s.  Drawing attention to a concept that has been completely overlooked in English language sources and never critically analyzed in the Japanese literature, Kai describes sunappu as being “at once a technique, a genre, and a discourse” (p. 4).  He argues that sunappu formed a distinctive entity in the world of Japanese photography, one...